Fabiano Caruana will challenge for Magnus Carlsen’s world title after winning the candidates tournament on Tuesday in Berlin.
Photograph: Soeren Stache/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

The American grandmaster Fabiano Caruana will challenge for Magnus Carlsen’s world chess championship in London this fall after winning the candidates tournament in Tuesday’s final round of competition in Berlin.

No player born in the United States has won or even competed for a world championship since Bobby Fischer in 1972.

The Miami-born, Brooklyn-raised Caruana draped himself in an American flag amid applause from the gallery at the Kühlhaus after winning as black over Russia’s Alexander Grischuk to complete the 14-game double round-robin with nine points, one better than Azerbaijan’s Shakhriyar Mamedyarov and Russia’s Sergey Karjakin, who finished on eight apiece. Ding Laren, China’s first ever candidate, was the lone competitor to finish the fortnight undefeated with one win and 13 draws, good for fourth overall with 7.5 points.

“I am absolutely thrilled,” Caruana, the world No3, said afterward. “Coming into today, I wasn’t sure what would happen and things couldn’t have gone better. A few days ago, I thought the tournament was already out of my hands, but somehow things just came together perfectly at the end. I really couldn’t be happier.”

Caruana, 25, led the eight-man field from start to finish, weathering a shaky two-game period over the last week and holding off a dogged fightback by the resilient Karjakin, whose dramatic win over the American in 48 moves on Saturday briefly thrust him atop the leaderboard beside the leader with two rounds to play.

But Caruana, benefiting from an extra rest day, bounced back on Monday to defeat pre-tournament favorite Levon Aronian of Armenia, while Karjakin was held to a draw by Wesley So of the United States.

That set the stage for Tuesday’s final round in which four competitors entered with a mathematical shot at the title. But after Karjakin drew with Ding, Caruana outlasted Grischuk over 69 moves and more than six hours to book his place across the board from Carlsen, who will be making his third defense of the world championship in the best-of-12-games match from 9-28 November in London at a venue to be determined.

“It’s still so far away, but I’ll prepare very seriously for it,” said Caruana, who earned the winner’s share of €95,000 ($117,827) with Tuesday’s candidates win. “I’ll come well-prepared. It will be a tough fight, but right now I’m not even thinking about it.”

Caruana first rose to prominence in 2007, when he became the youngest grandmaster in American history less than two weeks before his 15th birthday, a mark since bested by Sam Sevian.

He’d come agonizingly close to competing for the world title in 2016, but was forced to play for a win against Karjakin in the final round of the candidates due to tie-breaker rules and fell short. Instead, it was Karjakin who pushed Carlsen to the limit in that year’s world championship match in New York City.

Caruana, who is a dual US-Italian citizen but spent his childhood in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, competed internationally for Italy from 2005 until 2015, when he changed federations to compete as an American. He represented the United States on the first board at the most recent Chess Olympiad in 2016, leading the nation to their first gold medal at the tournament since 1976.

The lone other American to compete for a version of the world title since Fischer’s 1975 abdication was Russian-born grandmaster Gata Kamsky, who played under the US flag when he lost a 20-game match to Russian star Anatoly Karpov in 1996, when the championship was fractured between rival governing bodies and Garry Kasparov was generally recognized as the world’s strongest player.